Riggs Park (9 page)

For a week, Penny wouldn’t let anyone into her room. Murray fired the offender, but no one pressed charges because Penny would not speak of the event, even to her parents. She wouldn’t talk to Marilyn or me at all. She became so withdrawn that finally the family sent her to New York to stay with her grandmother, hoping she would revive.

For nearly a year, Marilyn and I learned nothing more. When Wish returned from camp before school started, we pressed for details his father might have revealed about the incident, but he knew no more than we did. We sent Penny letters, but she didn’t answer. Her sister Diane was back at college. Her sister Charlene would say only that Penny was okay. She was going to a school within sight of her grandmother’s building. She was fine.

I wasn’t reassured. There was a meanness in brick and concrete, I believed. I had seen it the year before when my family had visited New York: the tall buildings that closed off the sky, the stench and sound of traffic, the dearth of trees. Humans were not meant to be confined within the bounds of masonry. I knew Penny would come back changed.

And she did. When Penny returned to Washington the summer before we started tenth grade at Coolidge High School, she was someone else. She had become beautiful, but it was not only that. Her skinny body had taken on delicate curves; she had developed small, hard breasts. The fullness had fallen away from her face, leaving her with high cheekbones that set off her aquiline nose and accentuated slanted blue eyes framed by long, long eyelashes. No one had noticed her lashes before because they were such a pale red, but now, coated with mascara, they were elegant, lush. Penny still had freckles, but they didn’t matter anymore except to Penny herself. And her hair! No longer carroty, it had grown darker and richer, a perfect Crayola auburn. A stylist had tamed its wildness into a shimmering, shoulder-length corona.

At her grandmother’s urging, Penny had even been fitted with a pair of contact lenses. These were the first contacts Marilyn and I had seen, hard pieces of plastic that covered her whole eye. When Penny looked to the side, the outline of the lens was visible, signaling to us that such a large foreign object in the eye must be a torture device. Penny said she didn’t care; the lenses didn’t hurt and even if they did, she’d wear them anyway. She would do anything to be able to see.

Strange, how easily Marilyn and I were dissuaded from asking what had happened at the upholstery shop. “You can tell us,” we whispered when she first returned to town. But after Penny’s eyes misted with tears and she shook her head because she couldn’t speak, we changed the subject. Maybe we were put off by the changes in her. Maybe we really didn’t want know—not yet, not then. And later Penny seemed too vulnerable to ask.

It was clear right away that though Penny knew she was pretty, her transformation gave her no confidence. She longed for my blond hair, for Marilyn’s upbeat disposition, for everyone else’s strengths. She never saw her own tangle-haired, blue-eyed, narrow-waisted beauty except through other people’s eyes. The eyes of boys. When Penny returned home two months before her fifteenth birthday, she’d never had a date. She soon made up for that by going out with more than a dozen boys in the weeks before school started—boys who all told their friends she’d let them feel her up, and some who claimed she’d let them go all the way. Knowing how shy she was, Marilyn and I were as mystified as we were stunned.

But as far as Penny was concerned, chastity was not an issue—at least not enough for her to keep her escapades secret. When she phoned me for reassurance late at night, long after my parents were in bed, what frightened her was never boys, never her impending disgrace, never even the memory of what had happened. What frightened her was the dark.

“Talk to me,” she’d demand from the clammy depths of her basement bedroom. “It’s black as death down here.”

“Turn on the light, Penny. Do it right now.” I’d wait until I heard the click of the switch. “I tried to call you before. Where were you?”

“I was out with Sam (or Mel or Joey). I had to help him pick out a birthday present for his mother (or take his father’s car to the car wash or return a baseball bat to a friend).”

“You fooled around with him, didn’t you?” We’d known these boys since grade school—old friends and neighbors that made Penny’s behavior seem incestuous.

“Well, why not? He wanted to so badly.”

“Oh, sure…why not? You could get pregnant or you could get a disease.”

“I’m not stupid,” Penny insisted. “I made him use rubbers—” the term we used in those days for condoms “—and besides, I have a diaphragm.” I was horrified to think Penny had actually gone to a doctor and been fitted for a birth-control device. Did Penny’s mother know? Or care?

Even then I believed the boys wanted her not just for her beauty, but because the only way they could have her was physically. Part of her appeal was her vacantness, her inscrutable mystery, always that. Yet she had been focused enough to insist on not one form of birth control, but several.

I finished shredding the lettuce and started slicing a tomato. “Here’s why I can’t imagine her having a baby,” I told Marilyn. “Not just because she made up her mind way back at summer camp. But also because boys never stayed with her. They wanted her for a plaything, not a mate. She knew that. And it made her just mad enough that she was determined not to get caught. Even with Steve.” I threw the sliced tomato onto the salad, grabbed a cucumber, hacked it apart. My salad for three had grown large enough to feed a dozen people. Marilyn’s pile of vegetables, too, would make a stir-fry for an army.

We regarded the food with dawning dismay and might have burst into healing laughter if Marilyn’s eyes hadn’t suddenly grown wide. “Now I remember!” she said, brandishing her knife.

“Remember what?”

“Who would know where to find Essie Berman! Marcellus Johnson!”

“Who?”

“He brought her to my mother’s funeral. The hoodlum Essie took up with after we moved. They were still friends.”

“Oh, great. Now you’re tracking down hoodlums.”

“He hasn’t been a hoodlum for years.”

I put down my knife. “Absolutely not.”

“You could work on it tomorrow,” she said. “There’s no point sitting outside an operating room when someone is under anesthetic. They’re not grateful. It’s completely unproductive. Even Bernie knows enough to go to work.”

“Look at me, Marilyn,” I said, and waited until she did. “The answer is no. It was no at lunchtime and it’s no now and it will be no tomorrow.”

Marilyn squinted a little. Stealthily, but with considerable drama, she picked up an onion. I knew what she was doing: trying to call up tears. And there they were, right on cue, glistening drops in the corners of her eyes. A deliberate parody of the genuine emotions of earlier in the day.

“Marilyn, this is ridiculous.” I laughed because she wanted me to, but I felt ineffably sad as she grinned and wiped her eyes. The night before her surgery, she didn’t want to fight.

“I know the act doesn’t mean you aren’t sincere,” I said. “But onions? Onions? Who’s the con artist now?”

D
uring the night, the weather grew dull and chilly, and as the gray dregs of dawn crept into the kitchen, Marilyn looked as if she were having second thoughts about her face-lift.

“Scared?” I asked.

“Always scared, never chicken.” Although her surgery wasn’t scheduled until after lunch, Marilyn had to be at the clinic early for pre-op tests, and she was dressed in the clothes she’d been advised to wear for the trip home later that evening: sweatpants and a button-down shirt, since she wouldn’t be able to pull anything over what would be her sore, swollen face. Her hair was covered by a turban, a relic of the chemo days. She’d been instructed to shampoo before she left home, and not to rinse out the conditioner.

“The idea is that I won’t wash my hair again for a couple of days, and by then it’ll be all nice and silky.”

Instructed not to eat or drink after midnight, Marilyn watched Bernie chew his toast with such concentration that he finally abandoned it on his plate. She insisted he go to work. “Barbara can drop me off, she doesn’t have anything to do,” she told him. “Then she can run her errands.” As if I
had
errands. “The surgery isn’t till one, so why should either of you lose your morning? Then I’ll be under the knife three or four hours, so you can probably work all day. If I’m out early, I’ll call you.” As if she were having a tooth filled, or a pesky mole removed.

Of course, Bernie wouldn’t really stay at his office. He’d come to the clinic the minute he knew Marilyn had been taken to pre-op and spend the day in the waiting room. I’d be there, too. It was crazy, letting her plot our schedules so it wouldn’t seem we were concerned about her, but she’d made such a fuss about it that we agreed.

By the time we left the house, the rush hour had ended and a gray drizzle had started. The plastic surgery clinic was in Rockville, a sprawling modern testimony to the buying power of aging women. The airy reception area had vaulted ceilings, expanses of glass looking out onto dense green foliage, burgundy couches arranged on dove-gray carpets. On the pale walls, a thick, modernistic burgundy stripe had been painted at eye-level, tracing the angle of the ceiling. Several women sat reading magazines, but no one seemed to have touched the pamphlets about laser skin resurfacing.

“Do you have an appointment?” a receptionist asked from behind her glass cage.

“Marilyn Waxman.”

The woman consulted a list on her desk and nodded. “Surgery’s upstairs.” She buzzed us in, pointed us to an elevator.

“There’s still time to change your mind,” I said.

Lips tight, she shook her head.

The upper floor was a complete surgical suite: operating rooms A, B and C, and yet another glassed-in reception area. With a show of bravado, Marilyn checked herself in and was whisked off for tests and prepping while I was shown to the waiting area. I drank a cup of coffee from the urn on a table. I flipped through the selection of magazines without picking one up. The elevator opened and out walked Bernie, clutching his briefcase as if, after all, he really did plan to work all day.

“Did they take her back?”

“A while ago.”

“We should probably have lunch,” he said.

I wasn’t hungry and could tell he wasn’t, either, but my watch said noon so we followed the signs to the snack bar and got sandwiches. Back in the waiting area, Bernie set his briefcase on an end table, shrugged off his suit jacket, and pulled at the knot in his tie as if in for a long siege.

“We had a meeting with the doctor the other day,” he told me. “Marilyn won’t be out of surgery until at least four o’clock. Then she goes to recovery, and then ‘post-recovery’—whatever the hell
that
is—where we can see her.

“In the meantime there’s nothing for us to do. I know you want to go out to the cemetery. I think you should.”

“I’d be too worried,” I said.

“I’ll call if there’s any reason to. Do you have a cell phone?”

I didn’t.

“Here, take Marilyn’s.” He reached into his briefcase and drew it out. “She won’t be needing it today.”

“I can’t just
leave.
”

“You can. You should. You always procrastinate till the last minute about going to see your parents’ graves, and you’re never happy until after you go.” Bernie took my hand, leaned close, kissed me on the cheek. “Go,” he said.

So I did.

I reached the cemetery half an hour later, a hilly expanse of lawn and a few shade trees set behind tall fences in the midst of what had once been rural pastureland but was now suburban sprawl. The bit of woods on one side and tall apartment buildings on the other were far enough in the distance to give me a sense of being in a carefully tended park. Hard as it always was to make myself come there, it was a surprisingly peaceful place.

My parents were in the “new” section, thirty or forty years old, where raised headstones were not allowed, just plaques that lay flush with the ground. The identical bronze markers, engraved with tendrils of vines and flowers, were inscribed in graceful block letters: Harold “Harry” Cohen, Devoted Husband and Father, 1912-1985; Ida Marmelstein Cohen, Musician, Devoted Wife and Mother, 1915-1985.

My father, a pharmacist, hadn’t thought his profession important enough to be on the plaque (most people didn’t), but he’d put my mother’s on hers. At age seventy, she had been killed in an auto accident less than an hour after doing what she liked best: playing her clarinet in an orchestra at the National Gallery of Art. A snowstorm had started halfway through the concert, and the violinist who always drove her home skidded on icy Sixteenth Street and rammed into a telephone pole. He was injured only slightly, but my mother was jettisoned onto the street.

Though I was in my midforties then, I felt too young to lose a parent. Wells and I were divorced. Robin was practically grown. I was alone. At the cemetery, Marilyn and Bernie stood on either side of my father and Robin and me, forming a protective shield. Trudi and her husband huddled next to us. We were all very stoic.

Afterward, as we were getting out of the car back at my parents’ apartment, Steve emerged from the building and held out his arms. He had canceled a singing engagement and come straight from the airport. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. I’m so sorry.”

It was then, clinging to him, that I began to weep—uncontrollably, for nearly half an hour, stopping only because Robin seemed so alarmed. I wasn’t sure, later, if my outburst was prompted by grief for my mother or gratitude to Steve for allowing me—years before, while there was still plenty of time—to forgive my mother for what I had once considered her terrible crimes. For making me take piano lessons even before I could read, for wanting her daughters to learn music the way other children in Riggs Park learned Hebrew, for watching with horror (after Trudi threw a temper tantrum and quit piano forever) as I, too, turned out to lack that innate sense of rhythm that might have made music come out my fingers instead of the cacophony that emerged even though I could hear the cadence perfectly well in my head.

I couldn’t really read music, either, any more than Steve could read words. “I never heard of anyone who could follow the treble clef but not the bass,” my mother said. Her tone was kind—more like “probably we need a therapist for this” than “you stupid fool”—but the words sat against my heart like a red-hot brand. If not for illiterate, talented Steve waiting for my help two doors away, I surely would have been scarred.

Struggling with Steve over his homework day after day, I saw that he had no more power over words than I did over music—and that my mother, like Steve’s teachers, was only confused and frustrated and never meant to be cruel. I recalled that even when Trudi and I were tiny, at the hour when other parents were reading bedtime tories, my mother had gone them one better and provided her children with music, too. She’d tucked us in, opened the latest box of reeds that had arrived for her clarinet, and regaled us with the musical themes from all the characters in
Peter and the Wolf
, while testing each reed for tonal quality and strength. Reed number one: the twittery bird; number two: the silly duck; then the sly cat and cheerful Peter, the booming grandfather (in a real concert, she reminded us, he would be played by the bassoon), the menacing wolf whose music really belonged to three French horns. Other times she found a reed of such good quality that she abandoned Peter altogether and played some favorite tune in its entirety: “Morning Mood” from the
Peer Gynt Suite,
the theme from
Swan Lake,
something sweet and haunting, such an ecstasy of sound that our childish crankiness vanished and we were hypnotized, bewitched, asleep. Compared with the uplifting power of music, Trudi and I realized, we were only grubby, earthbound things. How could our mother possibly choose us over
that?
Yet, those enchanted evenings when she sat at our bedside and not in some theater or concert hall, she did. She did!

And later, when other girls hated their mothers because they were becoming women themselves, for me it was just the opposite. It was Steve who finally said, “Sweetie, if piano lessons make you so miserable, the best thing you can do is give them up.” And I did. My mother seemed relieved. From that time on, I no longer resented that my mother’s eyes shone and a distant joyfulness settled over her features whenever she played (or sometimes merely listened to) music. Now I was transported, too, given over to the same universal language. If I had never been able to reproduce music with my fingers, I understood it very well with my ears, whether I was listening to Chopin or Bill Haley or Steve’s increasingly remarkable singing. Oh, I understood! It was the gift she’d passed on to me. I never resented her again.

That was what I thought about, safely cradled against Steve’s ample shoulder, the day my mother was laid into her grave.

It was a sad truth, I thought, that people did not always rejoice in the good fortune of friends who prospered. They were jealous, and they did not wish them well. But for Steve, I was always genuinely glad. He’d shown me what I would have learned nowhere else: that all lives are shaped like melody, each with its own theme, its trills, its path. We were all composers, after all.

“Mom, I think you always knew that,” I whispered as I set a stone on top of her marker, and another on my father’s. He’d died only three months after she had, of what doctors called an embolism, but what Trudi and I knew was a broken heart.

“Well, guys, you’ve got a nice spot here,” I said, pushing my mind beyond the sadness and trying to think only of how devoted they’d been, which always made me smile. The only big blowup they’d ever had was when my mother had been irritated by something and had told my father she wasn’t going to be buried in this cemetery at all, but cremated and thrown to the winds. My father, the product of a traditional Jewish upbringing that forbade cremation, had been horrified—which was all the more ridiculous because as an adult he hadn’t been religious at all. We went to services on the high holidays only because my mother wanted to hear the bittersweet strains of the “Aveinu Malkeinu” or the haunting melody of the “Kol Nidre.” It wasn’t that we didn’t believe in God, just that we believed in music more. But cremation? Impossible. My father had been so insistent that finally my mother had agreed.

Beyond that, the one Jewish tenet my parents had held dear was also the operative principle of my childhood:
Tikkun Olam.
Repair the world. Religious or not, if you were Jewish, repairing the broken world was the mission God had assigned you. My father was practicing
Tikkun Olam
by dispensing medicine to heal the body, my mother by dispensing sounds to soothe the soul. Trudi and I would find our own paths when we grew up. Our parents took this very seriously.

And for me and Marilyn,
Tikkun Olam
was a handy principle to apply to Penny and Steve. If we had to spend extra time teaching Steve something that seemed obvious, or comforting Penny about imagined slights that shouldn’t have upset her in the first place, we’d whisper,
Tikkun Olam
and try to be patient. The dyslexic brother and hypersensitive girlfriend were probably the projects God had in mind for us. Helping them would help repair the world.

Once more I touched the stones I’d set atop each of my parents’ graves and blew them a kiss as I turned to walk away. “I’m glad I got to talk to you,” I said. “And on such a nice day, too.” After the morning rain, a brilliant sun had come out. I was aware of being an aging child speaking to parents who couldn’t hear me, but this was what I always did. There was no one within earshot, so I didn’t feel foolish.

I wandered aimlessly around the cemetery for a long while. Just as I couldn’t bring myself here easily, it was also hard to leave. The grass was the rich green it often was in spring and again in fall before it went dormant; the sunlight was warm but not oppressive. Beyond the fence, brilliant trees burned in the sharply angled light. Autumn afternoons were often like this in Washington, the golden sunbeams so intense and precious they might have been conscious of their own impermanence, keenly aware they were about to fade. When I stopped, I realized my feet must have known all along where they were going. Carolyn Waxman, the head-stone read. Beloved Infant Daughter of Marilyn Ginsburg Waxman and Bernard Waxman. Beside it were the two burial plots that would one day shelter her parents.

It struck me that, even as I stood there, Marilyn lay unconscious on an operating table, the skin lifted from her face, the underlying muscles being tugged taut, monitors assuring that her disease-ravaged body was surviving this latest trauma, in the struggle to buy her peace of mind.

How, even for a second, could I have forgotten that?

It took forever to get back to the clinic. A wreck just south of Rockville blocked traffic for nearly an hour. It wasn’t until I finally arrived, breathless, that I realized I could have used Marilyn’s cell phone to check in with Bernie at any time. What did that say about my state of mind?